Tommy Pico Receives the Prestigious Whiting Award for Poetry

R E D

Chase Berggrun

R E D excavates from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, through the process of erasure, an original narrative of violence, sexual abuse, power dynamics, vengeance, and feminist rage, and wrestles with the complexities of gender, transition, and monsterhood.

What People Are Saying

Srikanth Reddy

"I tried to undress a mystery,” testifies the speaker of R E D as this haunting literary performance—somewhere between neo-Gothic burlesque and formal experiment in queer auto-theory—begins. Erasing Bram Stoker’s Dracula all the way down to its psychoanalytic minimalia, Chase Berggrun unearths a narrative not only of gender transition, but of the uncanny political and metaphysical transitions entailed by the metamorphosis of individual into chorus as well. By the end of this adventure in appropriation as self-disclosure, we learn that the “mystery” was self all along: “A detail in a pool of blood / the body gathered in an awkward kink / I dress myself in easy anything.” Rapt and unsettled, we readers find ourselves, too, both saturated and implicated in the sanguinary affair of desire, “drenched to a scarlet with want."

TC Tolbert

“I violate limitation” says the speaker in Chase Berggrun’s R E D and how can I help it, I love her to no end. This is a book that celebrates, no, reifies the power of erasure to usher in (re)creation. There are echoes of Hélène Cixous who, in Coming to Writing, says: “In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings. When you have come to the end, only then can beginning come to you.” The gifts of transition. The gift of a body becoming “a determined echo hammering away.” How my own body needed these “hands full of sound.”

Natalie Eilbert

Riot. Ruin. Storm. Fog. Smoke. Blood. Such words swirl and ravage and seduce the body, verb and noun in collusion with imperiled women. Chase Berggrun’s R E D is deathy goddy girly queer erasure supreme. They turn the “I,” that bossy mercurial pronoun, into a transcendent blade beyond confession. They take the broken thing of identity and endow it with the kind of agency that can only arise in the survivor, one who has seen madness only in what madness has already been done to them. The body queers, it splints, it is “afraid the dead remember,” and it theories and plots behind the scaffolds of husbands and men. Here is a selfhood that comes alive in declarative flourishes, as it maps a redemption that is at times a most delightful physical texture (“I am only taking one dress”) and at other times, damn near gnostic in its darkness (“Only God can guide us in the fog / and God seems to have deserted us”). If Sappho’s fragments were the result of the fragile papyrus on which her poems were writ, then it is the fragility of men that has helped bless Chase with their miraculous tool of erasure. Chase’s brilliant debut demands to be re[a]d with an exasperated, murderous clarity. Throw away the story you know about Dracula. Here it is real for the first time, in all of its chutzpah and necessary desecration: “Women have something in us that makes us rise.” Amen, amen.

Inside the Book

Reviews

In Berggrun’s striking debut, a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that text becomes fertile soil for cultivating complex story of sexual awakening, domestic abuse, and liberation. “I am young and desperate/ If I have to I will burn the world,” the unnamed protagonist declares, heralding a riveting contribution to a genre that often leans too heavily on concept. Indeed, if flipping Stoker’s novel into a feminist narrative is a somewhat straightforward reversal, Berggrun’s poems convey that narrative’s stark circumstances with a poignancy and rage difficult to achieve: “I had trusted him my husband/ even half believed his words when he said/ I would have an ordinary life without dread.” The brief prefatory note on process, indicating that the book “was written at the same time its author had begun their own gender transition,” gives deeper symbolic resonance to the material transformation of text. When the speaker asserts that “I am sane though proving it has been dreadful,” readers hear her triumphant reclamation of agency after abuse and recognize its resonance with the process of gender transition in a transphobic society. Capped by a challenging conclusion, Berggrun’s assured composition is neither beholden to the original nor so distant as to be unclear in its motivation.

In Chase Berggrun's visionary erasures of Dracula by Bram Stoker, the speaker has both suffered and anticipates loss. The pieces here, each a chapter of Stoker's novel, are shown in their final form and as full, erased chapters. They describe presages, sleeplessness, and psychic torture that lay the groundwork for what's to come.